Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 321-343). / The aim of this study was to examine the issue of intimate partner violence from the perspective of young adults. My interest was to access participants’ stories of partner violence and to tap into their usual ways of thinking and talking about this issue. I wanted to attend to how young women and men actively imparted meaning to themselves and others, and how they constructed and performed their identities through the situated interaction of the research interview. Importantly, I used interactional, performative and narrative-discursive analytical perspectives in order to attend to three aspects of young adults’ talk: the content, the language and structure, and the telling as performance and interaction.